The adoption of e-mail has occurred at an unprecedented pace. Of routine computer users, most now have or soon will have an e-mail address. Many have more than one e-mail address, e.g., one for work and another for home. E-mail offers unparalleled convenience of written communication.
Besides ubiquitous e-mail, another powerful trend is wireless access via a variety of wireless devices, e.g., cell phones, pagers, hand-held computers such as Palm and Windows CE devices, etc. Service-specific e-mail gateways allow an e-mail message to be sent from the Internet to a particular wireless device. In the case of a Sprint PCS phone, for example, an e-mail may be addressed to #@sprintpcs.com, where # represents the telephone number of the phone. Despite this capability, wireless messaging is greatly complicated by the fact that a person may have multiple wireless devices, and that at a given time, the sender has no way of knowing the person's whereabouts or preferred method of message delivery at that time, let alone the address specifics pertaining to each gateway.
For example, the person may be in the office, in which case desktop e-mail would be preferred, on the road staying at a hotel, in which case cell phone e-mail might be preferred, or on the road away from a major metropolitan area, in which case pager e-mail (which has nationwide coverage in the US) might be preferred. This situation, referred to herein as the “multiple e-mail box conundrum,” is illustrated in FIG. 1. An intended recipient B of an electronic message may receive electronic messages through one or more wired devices and/or one or more wireless devices, which may include some or all of the following: an ISP mail account, a free web mail account, a PDA mail account, a cell phone subscription, and a pager subscription. In each instance, e-mail is delivered through a different server or gateway connected to the Internet, i.e., a ISP mail server, a portal mail server, a PDA mail server, a cellular gateway and a paging gateway. A message originator A may, at various times, use some or all the devices mentioned to send an electronic message. In the multiple e-mail box conundrum, the message originator needs to know which e-mail address to use to reach the user. In turn, the recipient must monitor all accounts and devices to keep track of critical information. Furthermore, in the case of a wireless network gateway, the wireless gateway will typically strip off any e-mail attachments, usually without any notification to the user.
Note that, in FIG. 1, wired devices may be stand-alone or LAN-based. In the case of stand-alone devices, connection to the Internet is typically dial-up access through an ISP. In the case of a LAN-based device, a server on the LAN may be connected to the Internet through an ISP or directly to the Internet without the involvement of an ISP.
Neither ISPs nor wireless providers are well-positioned to offer a complete solution to the electronic messaging problem. ISPs are primarily focused on new customer acquisition and often do not have enough users to attract wireless partners. In the case of wireless providers, users are generally unwilling to switch their primary e-mail address. And wireless vendors are generally unable to integrate with existing e-mail services.
With the widespread adoption of e-mail, there has also occurred the proliferation of junk e-mail, or “spam.” Currently, of the hundreds of millions of e-mail messages sent each day, about 30% of those messages may be expected to be junk e-mail. FIG. 2 illustrates “spamming” of the user of FIG. 1. Various companies (e.g., Brightmail Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.) have addressed the problem of junk e-mail by providing e-mail filtering software that attempts to identify and discard junk e-mail. Typically, such software resides on a destination e-mail server. Such a solution does not scale well; i.e., installing and maintaining e-mail filtering software on e-mail servers grows increasingly difficult as the number of e-mail servers multiplies.
Because of the resources required to install and maintain an e-mail server, various companies have emerged offering e-mail outsourcing in which the e-mail server is provided by a third party outside the organization. E-mail outsourcing off-loads the responsibility for providing and maintaining e-mail service without necessitating any change in domain or e-mail addresses. E-mail is retrieved from an off-site e-mail server provided and maintained by the e-mail outsourcing company. One example of an e-mail outsourcing company is United Messaging Inc. of Malvern, Pa. Despite such arrangements, the multiple e-mail box conundrum and the junk e-mail problems remain.
Accordingly, a need exists for a scalable, transparent solution to the junk e-mail problem. Also, a need exists for a unified messaging solution, embracing wireless messaging, that addresses the foregoing drawbacks of the prior art.